| Title | : | The Wishbones |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0425169715 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780425169711 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published May 5, 1997 |
The Wishbones Reviews
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I think I've had enough of hanging out with the guys, for awhile. Is there a name for this genre? It seems as if every third book I've read lately is told by some oblivious guy in the midst of wedding preparations who is challenged by the concepts of self control, responsibility and basic budgeting and planning. I was enjoying this book until it delved deeper into Dave's intimate relationships and his deliberate choice to leave every conflict unaddressed. I feel like I transferred on to the wrong bus, halfway through the trip, and am now in a neighborhood I'd rather avoid.
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When you read Tom Perrotta's later work, this seems almost childish in subject matter. But his early novel about a wedding singer still living with his parents speaks to the love of music that freezes you in your development. Duke Ellington once said, 'Music is my mistress, and she's a jealous lover.' Perrotta's protagonist, Dave Raymond, is less elegant about it but just as torn.
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Giving this book three stars is probably too generous, but I've been reading Tom Perrotta's stuff since the '90s and I'm a fan. (Please don't say, "That said..."). That said, the story here is, you know, nice. It's very familiar. No thinking is required. It's been done to death: a 31-year-old musician in a wedding band is still living with his parents and needs to figure out his life. Yawn! I'm a 52-year-old reader who needs to figure out how to stop picking up books with a coming-of-middle-age storyline. And while we're at it, someone please tell Jud Apatow to stop making the same movie with this theme over and over. Tom Perrotta, I expect better from you.
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I was let down by this one. I thought it would be more of a send up of band culture and less of what it was.
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Ugh hated this book. Thank goodness it was short. It was boring, there was no story, and I didn't like it at all. All of the characters were shitty people doing shitty things and I didn't see the point.
Read during Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon - July. -
I'm a fan of Tom Perotta. I especially admire his ability to get ahead of social trends in his books. He seems to sense the "next big thing" and he's there, several steps ahead.
In this amusing but not overly demanding novel, Perotta gives us the archetypal character of Dave, a boy-man of 31 still struggling to grow up. Since this book came out in 1997, that character has become the stock-in-trade of Judd Apatow and his ilk. But Perotta was there first.
Dave is a rock star-wannabe who plays in a wedding band and lives at home with his parents. Sound familiar? It's a classic case of "failure to launch." He's been going out with Jennifer for 15 years since they were high-school juniors (with a couple of breaks).
One evening, feeling emotional after watching another ancient musician keel over and die, Dave proposes. No sooner does he take the plunge than he gets cold feet. And he meets Gretchen, the cool, poetic, Brooklyn-living, semi-intellectual who could be his true soul-mate.
One thing I've notices about Perotta's books is that after the skillful set-up, which seems to be pointing to a truly magnificent climax, he often cops out and settles for the conventional happy ending. Such is also the case here.
Perhaps that's fitting. A big climax may have been too heavy for a story this lightweight.
This book is amusing and Perotta has a good ear for dialogue as well as for the pulse of the zeitgeist (if I can mix metaphors). It's a pleasant read. -
I just read this again (probably the fourth time) and it remains, along with "High Fidelity" one of the best books about guys and how we relate to the music in our lives. The conversations between friends ring true throughout the book and I couldn't recommend this book more highly. There are more than a few passages that are laugh out loud funny and admittedly, one or two that got the tears flowing. I've recommended this book countless times to friends and do so again, here. Tom Perrotta gets it right all the way through.
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It seems that we all have to settle down and become adults at some point. It just doesn't have to be as depressing as we think.
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Another good read by Tom Perrotta. And another man cheats on his significant other. Seriously, it makes me as a reader wonder why infidelity is consistent theme in Perrotta's books, and how comfortable his wife is with it.
The Wishbones are a wedding band. Don't think 'Wedding Singer' here, ala Adam Sandler. Think of what would happen if Rob, Barry, and Dick from Hornby's High Fidelity made a band. Dysfunction and mayhem, right? Of course. Because dysfunction and mayhem is what Perrotta does best. And of course, adultery.
The Wishbones are comprised of Buzzy, Artie, Stan, Ian, and Dave, the main character. Dave is basically in a comfortable rut: he works a delivery job during the day and the occasional wedding gig by night and has been dating Julie for over 13 years. After an unexpected heart-attack of the lead singer of a rival wedding band, Dave panics and asks Julie to marry him. Though he regrets asking the next day, the wedding is already set in motion and he can't do anything about it. Until he meets Gertrude, a sexy poet from NYC, and starts an affair with her. He is torn between a girl he loves and a girl he wants, and of course what the next step for him is, in relationships and in life.
The sidestories are great, too--Buzzy, the alcoholic; Stan, a new-found alcoholic recently seperated from his wife; Ian, the gorgeous lead-singer who has written a musical about the JFK assassinations; Artie, the jerk manager.
A fun read, and a mildly predictable end, but still. Another good one by Perrotta, one that can be re-read more than once for pleasure. -
This book sucks. It's just good enough to keep you reading through to the end just to see what happens, but in my book, a book like that is worse than a fully bad book. At least with a fully bad book you can just put it down right away and forget about it.
(Incidentally, this is just my exact review of Tom Perrotta's _Joe College_, cut and pasted. Fuck that guy.) -
This book was.... something else entirely. Look the idea was fantastic and the writing skills were not the best but still good but there was just not that spark of romance I was told about. I was most certainly not happy about some of the decisions Dave made but at least in the end he made the right choice. That’s all I’m going to say really. Not impressed.
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I think Perrotta phoned this one in
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Re read this one to kick off my 2019 book challenge. Unfortunately, it did not age well. I remember loving Tom Perrotta's novels when I read them a decade ago. However, these days, books like The Wishbones and even Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (which I re-re-read last year) and their whiny male protagonists who refuse to grow up just irritate me. Maybe this finally means I've grown up :) and don't put those so called "bad boys" on a pedestal anymore. Amen.
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So, I started a pretty thorough review of this book, but lost it to the ghosts of the internet. So, I'll do a briefer version. I just don't have the energy to bitch and moan about books any more.
Despite the wicked words I'm going to use, I actually enjoyed Perrotta's book. It was a fun, trashy, smooth read, and I'd read it again, if I hadn't read it already. Got it?
So, The Wishbones reminds me a bit of a poor man's Nick Hornby novel air dropped in New Jersey. It's so 90s-centric and dated, so funny. The peripheral characters are more realistically wrought than Dave and his cadre of loser friends. Zelack, with his sleazy hairdo and rock star pose, and Dave's parents with their stinky newsprint and meat loaf and green peas are much more real than Dave's teenage problems. Why is Dave afraid of marrying Julie? I understand as a man, but not as a reader. Stan, with his marital problems, is more of human figure than any other in the whole book.
Perrotta starts to really hit his stride when Dave meets Gretchen. The four smokers, in costume, sitting on a chintzy balcony over the fumes of a dumpster and the hush of the parkway bring me into Jersey (though I'm there every single day) more than anything else in the novel. I laughed at the flat description of a 90s Park Slope and Lower East Side - mostly just because I'm glad all that grunge, self-important nonsense is over with.
Perrotta doesn't convince me that he has a solid enough feeling of music to write about musicians. His choices for detail are fraught with classic rock cliches and generic rock bullshit. Maybe that's the point. The namesake of the book is, after all, a wedding band. I just can't get past such pandering, or lack of taster, whatever the case may be.
And I do really think Perrotta is pandering to us. He doesn't trust his readers to know what a marble notebook is. Who the hell would be reading this book and not know what a marble notebook is? Nobody.
There's enough humor to carry the book, and to make it quite a nice vacation read. It's relaxing if you don't let the clumsiness of Perrotta's writing get on your nerves. Rockin' Randy and the Shiny Angels and the Nazis at the Wursthaus kept me laughing, but Dave's feeble attempt to step into Gretchen's world got me to cringing.
All in all, I have to say that Perrotta leaves us with images that are much more rich than the words with which he creates them. I cringe when reading, but on reflection I enjoy the comedy - and rarely the poignancy - of the situations. Kirkus wrote, "It'll make a terrific movie." It's certainly got all the trappings of a shitty romantic comedy.
Nonetheless, I think I could read another Perrotta book. -
God bless the cover. I usually have about 90 seconds at the library to find a read while the kids wreak unseen havoc on the children's section. The fiction shelves at McKinley though, are between the door and the play area and the resulting confidence that no one could abduct my brood without me at least being able to heave a hardcover classic at him allowed me to look for an added minute. I often look for contemporary books, and restrict my search to something with the size of a first edition hardcover but with the binding of a paperback. I'm sure there's no study whose evidence reveals these books are more enjoyable, but the criteria frame my search and help me to keep it quick. After pulling a few out that had illustrations of women's shoes or a picture of an Indian restaurant in flames, I lighted upon The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta. Its cover boasted the image of hands on an electric guitar and produced the music any book would be proud to sing: "a New York Times Notable Book," "...sheer pleasure," "...American Nick Hornby." 15 years ago, I had the time to select books by picking out half a dozen then sitting and reading the first chapter or two, but unfortunately all I read back then was Stephen King or Tom Clancy and my extra time was instead spent watching ER and Saved by the Bell re-runs with a six pack. Lucky for me, this time my keen selection process paid dividends. The Wishbones is exactly as promised by both imagery and testimony. For those who aren't put off by a story of a man clinging to his twenties well into his thirties, who struggles with wedding plans and infidelity, who plays in a cover band and lives with his parents, then this can be a wonderfully brisk and humorous read. Enjoy!
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Perrotta's first published novel and, likely, the last his readers will come across. I remember buying it from a Stafford charity shop back in the days before Perrotta's UK publishers were canny enough to bung 'by the author of Election' on the cover.
It read much like something Nick Hornby would have churned out had he been born an American. Perrotta's touch is lighter, though, and it's true that a certain weightlessness sometimes harms his work - a lack of conviction. Artists, of course, have only to pose the question correctly, not provide the answer. But they should do so with more gravitas than fits into a sigh.
If it has much in common with a certain Adam Sandler film one should note this novel came out first. The main character heads a fivesome doing wedding gigs. He is still haunted by dreams of the Big Time, and can't help noting his bandmates every minor flaw and those of the naff hotel they hold auditions in ('the unmistakable odour of mediocrity that seemed to be as much a part of the Sundown Lounge as the paper tablecloths and the green leatherette menus').
All very common with heroes in first novels.
I notice a lot of things that I didn't at 18. The best authors don't impress me with big set pieces - they impress me with a thousand and one small touches. When the lead singer in a rival band drops dead on stage, the hero notes the 'tiny urgent flares' shooting off his tacky red tuxedo under the stage lights. A little touch that gets a large tick.
This is the least of Perrotta's novels, though that isn't saying much when Little Children and Election are part of his back catalogue. His short story 'The Smile on Happy Chang's Face', as yet unavailable in Britain, is well worth getting hold of. -
I'm in a band and this is a pretty good description of life in a band. The Wishbones are a wedding band fracturing on the shoals of alcoholism, marriage, infidelity and misguided ambition (bandleader Artie wants to give up weddings to start a Christian rock outfit). The setting is New Jersey reception halls and split levels. Les Paul-toting main character Dave Raymond is caught between his fiance, girlfriend and dreams he could have made it with a punk rock outfit that inspired bathroom graffitti 10 years ago.
In some ways I am reminded of my own (nearly geriatric) Howling Commandos Blues Band, which has endured the introduction of a mandolin-playing Yoko Ono-like girlfiend, a drug-addled prima donna lead singer who left the band to go solo, a domineering lead guitarist who we had to fire because he was too good for us, and, frequently, subpar songwriting and amateurish playing. Not great writing, but often poignant nonetheless; recommended reading for a beach umbrella or train commute. -
I was surprised that there's a poetry reading in this book!
OK, I finished it, and I loved learning more about how men think, and how men who are sort of adult boys think. There was a lot of tenderness here, and hilarity, too. I cared about everybody and marveled at the good behavior that always went hand in hand with the bad behavior.
Perrotta has a fine, spare prose style. He has observed people closely and rendered them specifically. There's wild humor and deadpan humor, throwaway lines, suspense (of the quiet, realistic sort), and sweetness. I loved how subtle he could be, even in not at all subtle moments.
A very good read! -
After LOVING
The Abstinence Teacher and
Little Children, I started reading all the Perrotta books I could. But it turns out his early work is not nearly as good. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters in this one; they were all just sort of jerks. -
Like High Fidelity meets The Wedding Singer, in a good way. This is early Perrotta - very early - and you can tell he's still working out the kinks in his writing. There's a clumsy plot device or two, some clunky dialogue, and things wrap up just a little too neatly for my taste. But its gentle riffs on life, love, and human nature are effortlessly engaging.
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Some parts made me laugh out loud. The author really has a way with dialogue.
If you can get past the fact that Dave is a duplicitous, cowardly man-child, you'll enjoy the story. Too afraid to go after his life, he settles. In all aspects of his life.
Poor Julie - is there anything worse than being the one he settled for? -
This is one of Tom's earlier books, and as I predicted, not quite as good as Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher, which I loved. All of his books could be movies though. Good stuff.
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I like some of Tom Perrotta's books a whole lot, but this one isn't quite there. I just can't stomach books about reluctant man-children anymore. Whatever, dude. Anyway, it's his first book, so things got a lot better after this.
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I have to admit, I was kind of pissed with Dave. I wanted Julie to find out and dump his ass. Then I thought, OK he wasn't happy, maybe this will make him happy. But at least man up and tell Julie the truth. In the end, I was still disgusted. But good story.
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This is basically the same story as High Fidelity, except High Fidelity does it better.
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Not bad, not good, just kind of... eh. 2.5 stars
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This book was the poor man's High Fidelity.
